“The Dark Knight Rises” is the concluding chapter to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the movie series that resurrected the moribund Batman franchise. Having given us the excellent “Batman Begins” and the legendary “The Dark Knight Rises”, the bar was set high for the grand finale, so one can hardly blame Nolan for wanting to give us something grandiose and epic for the final chapter.

And to a large extent, he succeeds. There’s plenty of Batman angst here, a sprawling cast of characters, a worthy adversary, and the city is certainly in peril. Yet the movie is so serious it’s smothering, there’s a dearth of action, and the “epicness” occasionally crosses the line into bloat.

There’s a very well made movie here, but I didn’t enjoy it half as much as I had hoped to.

Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” made its debut on Starz this past weekend.

Last year’s Academy Award winner for Best Original Screenplay, “Midnight in Paris” stars Owen Wilson as Gil Pender, a man who idealizes the Paris of the 1920s. Disenchanted with his career as a Hollywood hack, disrespected by his fiancée and lightly regarded by his future in-laws, Gil wishes he had lived amongst the great literary, artistic and culturally important figures of that time.

Contagion tells the story of the sudden appearance of a hyper-virulent strain of virus known as MEV-1.

MEV-1 is an airborne virus. If a person passes close enough to someone carrying the virus, and they breathe, they could contract the virus. It can also be contracted through tactile transmission. If a healthy person touches something a carrier touched, they could contract the virus. Between these two methods of transmission, and the fact that ground zero was the highly populated city of Hong Kong and patient zero was an international traveler, you have the recipe for disaster on a global scale.

And “Contagion” serves it all up for us in a stylistic, engrossing, high calibre movie experience.